The White House appeared to signal support for the idea of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) leaving the United States in a social media post shared Monday.
The post on X featured an image of President Donald Trump waving goodbye through a McDonald’s drive-thru window, captioned as a response to a clip of Omar saying she was not concerned about being deported.
“I have no worry, I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and like deport me,” Omar said in the clip, which came from her October appearance on “The Dean Obeidallah Show.”
“But I don’t even know like why that’s such a scary threat. Like I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore,” she continued.
“I’m grown, my kids are grown. Like I could go live wherever I want.”
Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and fled the country with her family during the Somali Civil War in 1991.
The family spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before the United States granted them asylum. They relocated to Arlington, Virginia, in 1995 and later settled in Minneapolis in 1997, Fox News reported.
Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000. She was elected to Minnesota’s House of Representatives in 2016 and later to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, becoming the first Somali–American woman and one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress.
Trump has frequently targeted Omar in public remarks, dating back to his first term in office.
He has accused her of being ungrateful to the United States and suggested that she should return to her country of origin.
On Nov. 1, Trump posted on Truth Social that “She should go back!”
The post included a video clip of Omar speaking in Somali, per Fox.
In September, Trump told reporters that Somalia’s leadership was not interested in Omar returning.
“You know, I met the head of Somalia, did you know that?” Trump said at the time. “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back. He said, ‘I don’t want her.’”
Omar later rejected Trump’s account, calling the story fabricated.
“From denying Somalia had a president to making up a story, President Trump is a lying buffoon,” she said, according to Fox. “No one should take this embarrassing fool seriously.”
Tensions between Omar and Trump have persisted since his administration. In 2019, Trump criticized Omar and several other progressive lawmakers known collectively as “The Squad,” saying they should “go back” to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from.
Omar responded at the time by accusing Trump of fueling racial and ethnic division. “You are stoking white nationalism bc you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda,” she wrote on social media.
ICE confirmed last month that nearly half of all Somali immigrants in greater Minneapolis are living in the U.S. illegally, Resist the Mainstream reported.
ICE’s report suggested that Omar’s advocacy has coincided with widespread fraud involving fake marriages, forged death certificates and other methods designed to deceive immigration authorities.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edley called the schemes “bizarre” and widespread.
